Israel had a plan for war

San Francisco Chronicle:

More than a year ago, a senior Israeli army officer began giving PowerPoint presentations, on an off-the-record basis, to U.S. and other diplomats, journalists and think tanks, setting out the plan for the current operation in revealing detail. Under the ground rules of the briefings, the officer could not be identified.

In his talks, the officer described a three-week campaign: The first week concentrated on destroying Hezbollah's heavier long-range missiles, bombing its command-and-control centers, and disrupting transportation and communication arteries. In the second week, the focus shifted to attacks on individual sites of rocket launchers or weapons stores. In the third week, ground forces in large numbers would be introduced, but only in order to knock out targets discovered during reconnaissance missions as the campaign unfolded. There was no plan, according to this scenario, to reoccupy southern Lebanon on a long-term basis.

I’ll direct you to Juan Cole for his assessment, since he knows what the hell he’s talking about, and I don’t. One thing I found particularly interesting in his piece, though, was this:

That is why I was so shaken by George W. Bush's overheard conversation with Tony Blair about the war. He clearly thought that it broke out because Syria used Hizbullah to create a provocation. The President of the United States did not know that this war was a long-planned Israeli war of choice.

…What is scarey [sic] is that Cheney and Rumsfeld don't appear to have let W. in on the whole thing. …Bush thought, if that is all that is going on, then someone just needs to call al-Asad and reassure him that we're not going to take him out, and get him to rein in Hizbullah. And then the war would suddenly stop. No one told Bush that this war was actually an Israeli war of choice and that al-Asad had nothing to do with it, that, indeed, it could only happen because al-Asad is already irrelevant.

That’s certainly a very real possibility. The other, of course, is that, the overheard conversation wasn’t a mistake at all, and Bush played the dimwit to create plausible deniability about the US Department of Defense’s involvement in this war of choice. It’s amazing how often this carefully choreographed presidency nonetheless results in Bush getting “caught” saying or doing something that feeds the idea he is a bumbling idiot, redirecting attention away from the decidedly non-bumbling machinations of the neocon architects by whom he is surrounded.